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7/27/2011 @ 2:51PM1,633 views

If you read anything this year on education reform, readthis. It confirms my experience that what ails inner city education is not the lack of money, modern facilities, great principals, gifted teachers, cutting edge curriculums, or spending-per-pupil.

My take on what Bill Gates has proven, over ten years and $5 billion into his noble philanthropic crusade, is that we can research the heck out of education, we can shrink classroom size, better train teachers, identify superstar teachers and their practices, but we will never ever ever appreciably move the needle on inner city academic achievement, unless students and parents, the lucky beneficiaries of Gates’ and our extraordinary largesse, are willing to step up to the plate and make education the number one priority in their lives.

If there is not follow-up learning in the home, if inner city parents are not dramatically raising their own academic achievement alongside that of their children, if great ideas and current events are not intelligently discussed over the dinner table, then inner city students will continue to lag. We don’t need a big fat Gates Foundation grant to make that claim. Experience teaches us this is so.

In the words of George Santayana, “a child educated only at school is an uneducated child.”

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